Seed: A Living Dream
An exhibition at Santa Barbara Botanic Garden
The following essay was written for the exhibition Seed: A Living Dream at Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, currently on view at their Pritzlaff Conservation Center Gallery, until June 8th 2025.
A cross-pollination between science and art, the exhibition celebrates the strange beauty of seeds, featuring micrographs from the Garden’s seed bank, paintings from local junior high students, and large scale ceramic sculptures by myself.
In the lead up to the exhibition Seed: A Living Dream at Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, I was invited behind the scenes, where I toured the Garden’s laboratories, herbarium and seed bank. I had a distinct feeling I was in a dream space. A staircase winds down beneath the gallery, going deep into the ground, a taproot drawing on an expansive well of time, energy and knowledge. The Pritzlaff Conservation Center holds years of research from the Garden’s scientists, alongside two hundred thousand plant specimens of the herbarium, themselves containing a millennia of plant knowledge. At the epicenter: the seed bank both cradles the future for the biodiversity of California, and its past, as encoded within each of these tiny seeds is a memory of a landscape that has been forever altered.
When curator Kevin Spracher talked of his hopes for the show, he mentioned celebrating the wonder of seeds, propagating surprise and curiosity by inviting the viewer to participate; applying their senses and imagination to understand the seeds in their own way. The botanists at the Garden enthused about their investigations in the field, following curiosity, cutting things up and seeing how they work inside. I realized my role as an artist is the inverse. I try to piece things back together; to understand plant morphology I hand-build their structures in clay, like putting the language of plants in my own handwriting. I grow plant-forms in my studio, I grow into them, to understand the intelligence of another species, I have to dance their dance.
I developed an interest in naturalism during the pandemic, beginning by identifying plants on my walks, in my neighborhood and in the foothills near my studio. Initially I was drawing them, looking closely at a tangle of weeds and shrubs, trying to distinguish each plant or just allowing myself to get lost in their shifting shadows. It was an intuitive exploration of the natural world, relying on my immediate tools: my senses. I sought to dispel the alienation I felt from the living world, at a time of global crisis and widespread isolation. Using botanical guides and the online scientific application I-naturalist, I made notes on who my other-than-human neighbors were. I repeatedly visited a local waterway; the Arroyo Seco, where I began to weave a relationship to place. I watched red alder roots breathe in the water, listening for the stories of mugwort and mulefat. I learned to recognize subtle seasonal changes as blooms bloated to fruit. I collected seed pods from the mulch, admiring their intricate anomalous structures.
Returning to my studio with my sketches and foraged pods, I learned much about sculpture from these strange seemingly-alien vessels. The structural integrity of their carpels and bracts provided me with a new way of building, interrupting the traditional ceramic techniques I knew, introducing an organic method for building at scale. Seed pod sculpting taught me how to lean into, instead of away from, the shifting-shrinking-fluxing-cracking characteristics of gradually drying clay.
As a ceramicist, I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about the vessel. Though not all ceramics are functional vessels, pinch and coil hand building techniques lend themselves towards building around and holding space. In my study of seed pods, my building style became botanical. I found that seed pods have much to say about holding carefully, about carrying precious and precarious futures. Seed pods know how to make and unmake themselves. Seed pods contain the knowledge of letting go.
My thinking is influenced by the teachings of Indigenous thinkers, whose cultures have long understood our role in perceiving the natural world as a participatory one: we are sensing organisms amongst other sensing organisms. We can live well by listening to and co-operating with the other living beings around us. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Potawatomi botanist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer elucidates,
‘We don’t have to figure out everything by ourselves: there are intelligences other than our own, teachers all around us.’ 1
When I take my sculptural cues from plant architectures - I feel myself to be collaborating with an intelligence not my own. Each new plant form has something different to say. I can’t always tell where the sculpture is going to go. I have to follow tactile and sensory cues, listening to my intuition.
To make the seed sculptures for this exhibition, I responded to micrographs of rare California native seeds held in the seed bank. This was a completely different experience to bringing a foraged pod into the studio to study. I paid close attention to the seed micrographs; drawing was a big part of that process. I had to slow my looking down, homing in on the tiny details, in order to later embody the structural patterning present in the seeds.
Looking under the microscope during my visit was illuminating. It mattered that I could physically recognize the scale. I had loomed over their tiny cluster, poking the seeds around, maneuvering them to see all angles. They pinged off of eachother and became entangled. The way each seed moved was distinct, and much more animated than you might imagine. It was almost as if I wasn’t moving them, they were propelled by their own energy. You can get some sense of this movement when you look at the group photograph of the seeds. Sanicula maritima for example, squirm alongside each other, their tendrils reaching out, becoming entwined, breaking off and leaving shriveled lumps behind.
I wanted the sculptures to inspire that feeling, like they had a mind, a life of their own. I had to let go of control, to lose myself in the task. Sometimes this meant starting over a couple times, conceding when I felt like I was too headstrong. Other times I invited in more chaos to the process: I prefer to use reclaimed clays from my studio neighbors, this loosens my grip. I can’t always know the characteristics of the clay I’m working with, as I mix different formulas of recycled manufactured clays, I get unexpected effects like marbled striations or hidden coloring that only comes through once the clay has been fired, I risk cracking as clay bodies may shrink at different rates. The risk is worth it, to feel that the sculpture is alive.
It was a challenge to represent these seeds. Because of their rarity, I was unable to visit the plants at home in the world. What I could observe of their being was a peep-hole view. This replicates something of the scientific method: a process of understanding that separates parts of a whole into specificities, to analyze, distinguish and categorize. Even now, I am still uncovering the secrets of these seeds in my communications back and forth with the Garden, for example, I was excited to discover from the botanist’s speculations on the Kern Mallow seed’s morphology; its mollusk-like curl is formed as a segment of a round, the fruits that produce it are wheel-shaped. This description brought a new dimension to my conception of this seed. I'm now able to look at my sculpture and see it nestled in a ring of similar seeds. Much like the collaborative aspects of this show: We’ve seen this exhibition come together piece by piece; each a distinct perspective on the seeds, from scientists, young students and myself. We puzzle-piece these interpretations in an attempt to more wholly know who these plants are. This is only a beginning, this show is an invitation to the viewer to participate, to bring their own personal experiences, sensory perceptions and resonances to the table.
I think an intuitive logic comes into play in our most foundational experience of the natural world: a sensorial exploration is one that is imaginative. My instinct is affirmed here by the writing of ecologist and philosopher David Abram in his book, Spell of the Sensuous;
‘The perceiving body does not calculate logical possibilities; it gregariously participates in the activity of the world, lending its imagination to things in order to see them more fully [...] Imagination is not a separate mental faculty (as we so often assume) but is rather the way the senses themselves have of throwing themselves beyond what is immediately given, in order to make tentative contact with the other sides of things that we do not sense directly, with the hidden or the invisible aspects of the sensible’ 2
Dreams are subterranean, coming to us from beneath the clarity of waking life, an internal place where our intuitions guide us to meaning. The title for the exhibition, Seed: A Living Dream is a play on the double meaning of the word ‘dream’. We can read it in both the sense of the mysterious subconscious, and in reference to our hopes for the future. A seed is a living dream. These intricate seed structures are envisioned as the thought-forms, the ideas and dreams of plants. They contain speculative worlds which humans can inhabit by extending our imaginations, through close observation and heightened sensitivity.
This exhibition has been about revealing the hidden details, celebrating the unseen work of the conservation center, understanding the quiet processes of seed germination, marveling at the camouflage of lupine seeds. These seeds speak to us of unknown and uncertain futures, they call upon our ability to respond to perilous times.
We must participate in our living world and the collaborative work needed to ensure ongoingness. We must use all of our senses and sensibilities to understand the hidden language of seeds. Perhaps when we come close to understanding, it will feel less like clarity and more like carrying each other through the dark; more like remembering.
If you are in Southern California over the next few months, I hope you will get a chance to see the show. The Garden printed some beautiful risograph zines with Bird in Hand Press, containing this essay and some process drawings and photographs. These will be available for free at the gallery while stocks last!
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, page 58
David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, page 58
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